Your Brain Is Hard-Wired to Love Trump

If you’re naturally a little bored by national politics, but still attracted to candidates who lie, shout and make you a little angry and scared, like many American voters are today, you have evolution—and the brain it created—to thank.

The modern human brain formed during the Pleistocene epoch—a period from about two and a half million to 11,000 years ago when the southern Andes were covered by an ice sheet that extended to Antarctica. Built to rely on instinct over reflection—instincts more suited to hunting saber-toothed cats than making public-policy decisions—our brains have changed very little since. According to Rick Shenkman, the author of Political Animals: Why Our Stone Age Brains Get in the Way of Smart Politics, this goes a long way in explaining the baffling state of politics today. Why do we believe politicians when they lie? Why do we shun nuance and flock to demagogues? Why do many of us never go to the polls? Do we have any hope of changing?

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Politico Magazine asked Shenkman these questions and more in an interview that took us from the parable of the lying chimp to why Hillary’s bank reform answers get boos during debates. And who’s running the best stone-age campaign? Donald Trump, of course. But Bernie is up there, too.

(This conversation has been edited and condensed.)

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There have been some high-profile lies this election season. The most recent that comes to mind is the story about the thousands of Muslims that were supposedly having tailgate-style parties celebrating after 9/11. In the book, you say, essentially, we’re OK with lies. Can you walk me through why we’re built not only for being deceptive, but also tolerating deception?

This is why our brain rationalizes our actions even when they’re at variance with our principles—that’s what cognitive dissonance is all about. So Trump supporters—when they hear Donald Trump say thousands of Muslims celebrated 9/11, and that turns out to be a lie, that obviously creates a conflict. Our brain tries to get out of these types of conflict in any way it can. One of the standard ways is to discredit the messenger—we say the mainstream media is full of it, for example. That’s true for Hillary Clinton supporters and true for Donald Trump supporters. All of us, Republicans, Democrats, we are all afflicted with this inclination to believe what we believe, and it doesn’t matter what the facts say. It took 11 months before public opinion started going against Nixon during Watergate.

By nature, human beings are meant to be believers. We aren’t skeptics. We believe, and only at the second step do we subject our beliefs to scrutiny—this is all based on research by Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert. That inclines us to deceptive politicians: We are inclined to believe them unless we have a previous reason not to believe them.

It’s not just buying other people’s lies, though, right? You also have the chimp story, about how lying comes naturally to us.

Human beings are deceivers by nature; you can’t go through the day without practicing some form of deception.

How deep is this in human nature?

When you read primate studies of chimpanzees, they show that chimpanzees are also by nature deceptive. Roger Fouts, a primatologist, was the first to teach chimps how to use sign language. One day, he sees that one of the chimpanzees he was studying had defecated in the middle of someone’s living room. He confronts Lucy, his chimp—they are using sign language—and she responds instantly, “It’s not me! It’s you!” And he says, “No it’s not me.” And then she blames it on a graduate student. And finally, after a heated exchange, she admits, “Yes, it was me,” and she turns sheepish.

It’s more than likely our common ancestor was deceptive by nature, which is why humans and chimpanzees have that trait. We like to think we’ve created the ideal community by encouraging people to be honest; the problem with that is that one traitor can take advantage of everybody. That is what happens in an honest community. Cheaters have the run of the place.

In order to protect against that, we have cheater detection software. It’s a very sophisticated: With most humans (except psychopaths, who don’t show signs), when someone is standing face-to-face with you and lying, they’re twitching, the pitch of their voice might increase, their use of language becomes less detailed—and our unconscious brains take over to identify them as a liar.

The problem in politics today is that our candidates are not face-to-face with us. We’re seeing them on TV, so our cheater detection software doesn’t work so well.

But there’s also the problem of people just not caring when they hear the truth, right? You have a good story about Grover Cleveland …

Grover Cleveland had a wonderful reputation as a truth-teller—it’s one of the ways he made such a rapid ascension through the ranks to president. And so when it was leaked that he had had a cancerous tumor removed, despite a White House-coordinated cover-up that he had just had a toothache, the public didn’t care. The media told the truth and the public didn’t really care. Wonderful example of how our resistance to truth—we don’t want the truth. We want our version of the truth.

There’s another side of this that politicians take advantage of. If politicians believe their own lies, they get away with it. It’s how they can get past the cheater detection software. A politician who is good at deception and really believes his own lies can really get away with lying—until he develops a reputation for lies. So, Donald Trump lies. But at some point he gets caught so many times that he develops a reputation for lies, and that’s when he’s got a problem.

You hear the term “outsider” a lot this election season. Does being an outsider have anything to do with not having a reputation as a liar yet?

That’s one of the advantages that outsider candidates have—they don’t have a paper trail. Donald Trump has been in the public eye for decades, but not as a politician. If people had read these books and exposés about Donald Trump, they would have a good sense of who he is. But most people haven’t been following him that closely; they’ve just seen him on TV.

The thing you keep returning to is that we’re naturally wired to be apathetic to politics—in 2014, the voter turnout was the lowest it had been in 72 years. Why are we hard-wired for that kind of voter turnout, and why do you think it’s getting worse?

I don’t say that we are hard-wired to be apathetic—I argue that we are pre-wired to be highly alert to the politics happening all around us. All human beings are politicians. All day long, we’re concerned with our status, we’re worried about what other people think of us. That is just intrinsic to human nature. But that’s only when we’re living in a small community of 150 souls or so, which was the typical community in which hunter-gatherers lived when our brains were still evolving. Our brain isn’t designed to live in a community with hundreds of millions of people. It’s that it’s local: You care more about what happens on your street than something that happens in a foreign country. That helps explain why we have so much apathy in modern-day elections.

Now, we have a paradox of sorts because turnout in local elections is usually far, far lower than in national elections.

But that’s usually because the stakes seem so low. Local issues aren’t usually susceptible to the same level of public debate as national issues. As they say, there’s no ideology to filling pot holes. In national elections the survival of our way of life seems at stake. And politicians have more ways of manipulating us to convince us only they can save us from catastrophe.